


Embers Still Breathe

by wyvernwood



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Amputee, F/M, Rule 63, The Dark Side of the Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-18 23:30:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20321332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wyvernwood/pseuds/wyvernwood
Summary: Periodically his body would begin to fail, the systems supporting it no longer sufficient to repair the damage, and he would need to go to her. To the Emperor, his Master; to Sheev, his lover; to his enemy: they were all the same person.





	Embers Still Breathe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chrysaora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrysaora/gifts).

It takes a great deal of machinery to remove the prosthetics that keep him alive, and even more to put them back on. It is not like taking off clothing. He remembers how easy it was to drop his Jedi robes on the floor and fall comfortably into bed at night. Things are different now.

The damage his body sustained on Mustafar makes it so that even the medical equipment in the prosthetics cannot keep him going for more than a fortnight without taking one of the two options he has for renewal. The first: twelve days earlier, he took the life force from Admiral Ozzel to sustain himself, refreshing himself with it like gulping water down a too dry throat.

He stands on the black slab and allows himself to be wrapped into the machinery's embrace. The device is careful, slow, it peels back each portion of the life support structure he wears with a minimum of damage to the flesh beneath. The process is uncomfortable but not quite painful. 

_That first time waking in this machine_ \-- he can't resist pressing into the memory, the feeling so much like the gap where a tooth should be, raw and empty and wrong. They had said she had lost the will to live, but one person had told him the truth. 

One person who is his second option when his life runs down to the dregs: he has chosen to come to her, now, to her palace, to her personal residence within it, to kneel to his Emperor, his Master, and wait to see if she will show him mercy once more. She may lie to him, and she has, more than once. But at least when Sheev Palpatine tells him lies, she knows she is lying and she has a reason.

As the machinery withdraws and leaves him naked, his thin and malodorous skin exposed to air for the first time in many days, he hears the gentle splashing of water in a basin. Sheev likes to wash him herself. She is wearing her cowled robe and he can see she has on nothing beneath it.

With the softest possible cloth and water so close to body temperature it feels neither warm nor cold, she sponges his skin clean. She is feeding the Force into him, healing him as she cleans him, so that his skin is durable enough to stand the washing, to shed the filth without tearing. It usually is not. 

The disturbance in the Force is mild in the Palace around them. Delicate strands of life that Sheev draws from, barely noticed as a momentary tiredness or a brief shortness of breath by guards and servants throughout, trickle into him and restore his health. 

When his face is clean, she moves down to his chest. The stumps of his shoulders shudder. He has no arms to embrace her with, even if he wanted to. Sometimes he wants to. She is so ugly, so unlike any woman he ever thought desirable, but he remembers she used to be beautiful, just like he did. Her silver hair and aristocratic cast of feature are as lost as his full lips and heavy-lidded blue eyes. They are ugly together now. It is strange and not strange at the same time that he desires her so intensely.

"My dear one," she says softly, and this is his cue to say her name. Only at these intimate times; all the rest he must say "My Master" or "My Emperor." 

But now he must say, "Sheev, my love."

"I am here," she whispers into his ear. She is washing his abdomen now, still so carefully and gently, still trickling healing energy into him as she goes. He is almost entirely clean. Only the parts below his waist await her ministrations.

His cock is not yet healed enough to twitch for her. It would if it could, though. He feels a shortness of breath that is nothing like the one he needs the respirator for. "I need you, Sheev," he says. 

"I am here," she says again. Teasing, she washes around rather than past, the wet cloth moving over his hips, his outer thighs, the ends of the stumps of his legs. 

There is not much of any limb left to him, yet he does not feel as helpless as he thinks he must look. The power of the Force coming into him, the growing passion, come together to give him more freedom and ability to reach out with the invisible hands he still has, sometimes, to touch without feeling, but at least to be felt. He does this now, stroking with Force touches along Sheev's hips, cupping her buttocks, caressing the small of her back. 

She smiles at him. "You are so eager, my dear one."

"Please, Sheev." Her teasing is making him increasingly desperate. The one place he most needs healed is the last one she will touch. 

"Please me first," she says. She stops washing, leaving the soft cloth draped over his groin, and lowers the slab until it is at the right height for her to straddle his head. Her sex is just above his mouth. 

She uses the Force to make sure he continues breathing as he pleasures her with his tongue. It is frustrating and exciting and he wants it to be over so she will restore his cock and he wants it never to end so he does not have to return to breathing in a mask, so he can always have her delicate lower lips on his mouth instead of hard-edged metal. 

Sheev comes with a gasp and a sigh and moves off him. He looks her in the eyes and licks what little remains of his lips with the whole tongue he still has, one part of him that wasn't burned at all. 

And then she begins to give him what he needs. First, she washes the remnants of his genitals. She heals them, and the erection is visible, the cock moves, but the Force can only heal what he has, not restore what Mustafar took. He is incomplete. 

If his genitals hadn't been so badly burnt, they might serve for such moments, but they had been. The name she gave him is sadly misaligned with the truth. He cannot become a father now.

_And yet._ The one recent piece of good news is that he still is one. He has discovered that Padmé's child survived. Sheev has agreed to allow him to bring his son into the darkness with him, and he will truly be Darth Vader when he has Luke by his side. 

Rather than try to bring him release physically, which he knows from wasted effort is not possible, she sends carefully guided energy into him through her fingertips. 

They seek the pathways that still remember what it felt like. The vagus nerve, the parasympathetic system, she knows these intimate features of his body better than he does himself. It _feels_ as though she's fucking him, as though he still has a full length cock and it's inside her slick tight walls, though in reality she's standing still touching him with eight fingers and not even moving. It is _so good._ His eyes close in bliss.

It hurts when he comes, even though he's nearly fully healed to the peak of what health his body can manage these days. The clenching and the back-arching and the grimace on his face are what hurt; his body isn't up to that. He is euphoric. The climax floods him with his own Force energies, pulling them from he has no idea where within him, the same place it used to come from when he meditated, he supposes. He still meditates, sometimes, but the Force no longer fills him when he does. That's the Light side; he is Dark now, so passion is what pulls the Force to him.

This, this is passion. He does not scream; he can stop himself, and he remembers how much screaming hurts. But he wants to scream. He would if not for the pain. 

When the rolling waves of Force and passion begin to subside, when he can breathe almost normally again, at least for these few minutes, he opens his eyes. 

"When you bring Luke to the dark side," she says, an evil gleam in her eyes, "I will have a whole man to pleasure me again." 

"What?" He is unsure of what she is saying. No, he is sure; he doesn't want to be, but he is. He knows he is barely half a man. Perhaps she is tiring of doing without.

"Will I even need you anymore then, dear one?" She pats his cheek. "Think on that as you put your armor back on." The Emperor is back. She waves a hand languidly. A droid hustles in, his clothing and prosthetics clean and ready to reassemble Darth Vader out of his component parts.

He thinks on it. Perhaps he should kill the boy after all. He does not want to, of course, but it may be necessary. Luke may not be able to be turned. 

She could not have meant it, he assures himself. It was only a ploy, to help him be angry, to keep him strong in the Dark side. It was likely to work, and the Emperor always did what would work. Always.

Out of the treatment room, through the room beyond. The Emperor has harsh-lined furniture, rich and dark, in the front room of her extensive living area within the Palace. This is all most visitors ever see of it, if they are fortunate and favored to see any at all. 

Darth Vader strides down the corridors of the Imperial Palace that was once the Jedi Temple. He does not look to either side or show in any way that he notices the red-robed Imperial Guards' scrutiny on him. He is tall and imposing and everyone fears him. This is how it should be.


End file.
